Skill Set

Cristo Rey New York is a Catholic high school whose motto—“The School That Works”—is more literal than you might think. “We were founded around a work-study program, so that, in effect, the school would function like a temp agency,” Father Joseph Parkes, the president of the school, said recently. Four days a week, students learn math and social studies; on the fifth day, they work, mostly doing clerical tasks for multinational corporations (Pfizer, American Express, McKinsey). Chaperones meet the child laborers at the school, on East 106th Street, and accompany them downtown. Their salaries revert to the school, at least at first; some internships turn into summer jobs, at which point the students get paid. “It’s a diversity pipeline for these companies,” Parkes said. (Cristo Rey is ninety-eight per cent black and Latino.) “The work program not only provides a huge chunk of operating income for us; it also gives students a good deal of poise.” In other words, it’s a hard road from Harlem to JP Morgan: why not start building your résumé at fourteen?

With the school/work year almost under way, incoming freshmen were called to school for a three-week course called Business Boot Camp. Wearing business attire, they attended lectures: Etiquette, Ice Breakers, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. One recent morning, a visitor audited a class called Phone Skills.

“Do people here like talking on the phone?” Darrell Romero, an H.R. representative from the law firm Kramer Levin, said. There were twenty-seven students in the classroom. No one raised a hand. “If I’d asked that ten years ago, every hand would be up,” Romero said. “Now, what has changed?”

“Texting?” one student said.

Romero nodded. “People think the phone is not important. But do you text your mother to say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’?”

“I do,” another student murmured.

Romero enumerated the rules of phone etiquette: introduce yourself, speak clearly, don’t eat or drink, don’t use slang. Then he divided the class into pairs for an exercise. “One of you pretends you’re in Cristo Rey’s front office and you’re picking up the phone. Then switch.” Daniela Fernandez, from the Lower East Side, raised her hand to her ear in the universal sign for telephone. “Good morning. Cristo Rey speaking—uh-oh.”

“Try again,” Romero said.

“Good morning. Cristo Rey High School. This is Daniela speaking. How may I help you?”

“That’s perfect,” Romero said.

Daniela lowered her hand, which was shaking, and smiled. Her partner, Briana Urena, said, “My nerves are killing me!” Daniela, suddenly a veteran, said, “Calm down—it’s just a phone line!”

When the exercise was finished, Romero asked the class, “Who froze?” This time, half the students raised their hands. “That’s fine. You do this ten times, fifteen times, you’ll be fine.”

The next class was Copying and Faxing. A teacher named Johanna Diaz, gesturing toward a PowerPoint slide projected on a screen, said, “You can copy things many ways. You can enlarge the font. There’s a stapling feature and a hole-punching feature. Why’s this screen shaking?”

“Every time a train passes, it shakes,” a student explained.

Diaz moved on. “Every fax starts with a cover sheet. Now, does anyone know what ‘c.c.’ is? It stands for ‘carbon copy,’ but really it just means you want someone else to see it. Like if you’re asking someone to do something and you want to make sure they do it, you might c.c. their boss. That’s probably not the nicest way to use it, but that is how people use it.”

The class took a field trip to the room where the school keeps its copiers. “I just want a simple one-sided copy of this document,” Diaz said, handing a piece of paper to Ricardo Rendon-Ramirez. Flustered, he pressed buttons at random. “Wait, can I just press Start?” he asked. “That was the trick!” Diaz said. “It was an easy one.”

Tiana Figueroa, asked to make a legal-size copy, began to giggle. “I’m so confused. What’s the— That’s the wrong one. Is this the right one?” It was. “I got it? I got it!” She clutched her legal-size copy to her chest.

At lunch, a student named Cristopher Michue was finishing an egg sandwich and a cream soda. He had worked before, as a cashier in his uncle’s clothing store. Still, he said, “it’s nerve-racking. We’re gonna be in big companies. You don’t know who you’ll be around. You worry about messing up.”

Cristopher wants to own a car dealership one day: “Acura, Toyota—not a Ferrari or something, because that takes too much money.” His friend Keudy Valdez wants to be a computer programmer. Jason Jerez was the only one at the table who had not yet been bitten by the office bug. “I want to work in sports,” he said. “I would even be the towel boy for the Knicks. Or maybe the guy with the mop. You could wring that out and sell it on eBay.” ♦

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